Rune.

Breaking free from the world’s enchantment.

Our culture shapes us with each bit of content we consume. The emerging generations face unprecedented challenges related to identity, purpose, and worship. A dark enchantment grips our society. How can we break free?

In the summer of 1941, C. S. Lewis preached a sermon at St. Mary the Virgin Cathedral in downtown Oxford, England. Students packed the chapel to hear the always dynamic Lewis give his address. We now know this address as, “The Weight of Glory.”

Lewis’s rhetoric soared as he exhorted the audience of undergraduates to beware of the magical charm that had subtly bewitched society.

“Do you think I am trying to weave a spell?” writes Lewis. “Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.”

Lewis wants to fight magic with a deeper magic.

Considering the desecration of the beautiful and holy, and the isolation embraced by the modern West, a loss of the spiritual shape of life, and a vision of the world that dims and reduces, Lewis’s words come to us now as prophetic of our own time.

Indeed, who will stand up and show the world a new way to live?

G.K. Chesterton said it is the great paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it the most.

Chesterton believed that when a generation becomes too worldly, it is up to the saint, or the church, to rebuke it.

He says, however, that each generation chooses its saint by instinct. The saint is not what the world wants, but what it needs.

A saint writes Chesterton, is someone who runs incongruous with the modern world, like that weird uncle of yours who lives on a farm and seems a little off because he doesn’t use the internet (I may or may not be that uncle).